


gasoline was on my clothes

by shunflower



Series: all you have is your fire [1]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Angst, It's mainly a setup for the fix-it i'm gonna do, M/M, Mick Rory Is A Good Person, Mick-centric, No Plot/Plotless, literally just angst, the author loves him with all their heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-24
Updated: 2016-11-24
Packaged: 2018-09-01 22:13:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8640142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shunflower/pseuds/shunflower
Summary: “The thing about hate, Mr. Rory,” Rip said to him when they were alone, “is that it can be worked past. And the line between hatred and love is far too easy to straddle.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> Wow ok i wrote this in one three hour sitting beginning at midnight so there's a ton of errors im sure
> 
> I was going to write a fix-it for the devastation that was the penultimate episode of season 1 but I got angsty and it's late so this is what happened. I'll be using this fic as a setup for my (hopefully) even more angst ridden fix-it. This is just some thoughts that Mick had, and me trying desperately to keep it at least somewhat in character. 
> 
> (Title from Hozier's "Arsonist's Lullabye", thought it was fitting)

And so, Hephaestus forges, as he himself was forged, within fire. 

 

***

 

Mick had always seen himself in flame. 

 

Even as he knew he had not done so on purpose, that night haunted him. He had sat and watched, entranced, as the place burned to the ground. 

 

Mick carried many sins, but that was one that would follow him beyond death. 

 

Up until he was 16, fire fought back that loneliness that pervaded his senses. His father wasn’t good. He knew that, and didn’t miss the man. His mother wasn’t great either, but that was no fault of her own.

 

His father, he liked using his fists. Mick didn’t remember much of him before the fire, but that much he knew. His father’s hands were cold. 

 

His mother was like desert sun personified. She scorched everyone in the room, and it wasn’t her damn fault, but she had those times when all she could think about was throwing the jars across the room and watching the preserves inside cover the cornflower blue walls. Books found their way to the floor and her yelling pervaded every nook and cranny of that house, stayed there for months as if they would sound off if you moved the toaster and found one. He never told anyone about the episodes, as if not saying anything would make them go away. It didn’t. 

 

Fire was warmth. It was the only thing that kept him from freezing from the inside out, the only thing that separated him from the abyss of loneliness. He burned so brightly as a teenager that he couldn’t even feel the cold. 

 

The first time he felt a cold that didn’t hurt, he was 16. Damn kid almost got himself stabbed his first day in juvie. 

 

Mick had lifted him, taken him to the infirmary, and one of those hands, so much smaller than his own, had found its way to the exposed skin of his wrist. He flinched, like he always did, but he felt it. His hands were freezing, like this kid was made of ice. The cold didn’t hurt. It didn’t sting, like the metal frame of his bed stung, or the ring that the one guard that tried to get rough with him wore every day did. It pushed to his bone, and did not leave for what felt like hours after he had dropped the kid off. 

 

And if, when the kid decided to stick around him, Mick was grateful, no one had to know. 

 

***

 

Rip Hunter was a good man, Mick knew, which was exactly why he and Leonard wouldn’t be joining. That was, until Len mentioned possibly wanting to go, if only for more chances to steal. 

 

Mick went along with it, as he always did. He would follow Len to the ends of the earth, or, if necessary, the end of time. He might not have been very self aware, but he knew that much.

 

After the failed heist, the one that left him covered in scars and burns, he had fled. He knew he had done it this time, he had driven Len away, so he left. Len didn’t get back to him for six months.

 

And when the kid came up to him in the Waverider, the one who could shoot fire when he merged with the professor, and asked him, Mick answered. 

 

“So, this is probably way outta line, but how did you get those scars?” Jax asked, leaning on the counter in that sorry excuse for a kitchen. Mick sighed, putting down the apple he had been eating. 

 

“I think outta line is my specialty, kid.” Mick said, grinning, but there was only a little warmth behind it. No offense to the kid, of course, but Chronos had attacked them again, and he was feeling a bit shaken by it. Something like foreboding had settled deep in his chest. “I was working a job. Shit went south, and evidence of who did it was all over the place. Did what I had to do, burnt the place down.”

 

“But you didn’t get yourself out? Did something happen that kept you from getting out?” Damn, he was nosy. Mick sighed, resigned to this, now.

 

“I knew I wouldn’t be able to get out. I’m damn lucky to be alive.” Jax nodded, as if this made sense to him. As if Mick seemed much like the self-sacrificing type. Mick grunted, fighting off the memories of the fire. It wasn’t the pleasant burn of a lighter. It was gasoline, pulling flesh from bone and replacing it as if he was being reborn from pain. A new man, or more accurately, a new monster. 

 

“Who was with you on the heist?” Jax asked, ghost of a smile on his face, like some puzzle piece had been found. 

 

“Get out, kid.” 

 

***

 

One night, after whatever adventure they’d had that day, Len had a nightmare. 

 

He didn’t tell Mick, never did, but he showed up once most of the crew was asleep, once Mick was asleep, knocking quietly on the door and jolting him out of sleep. He got up, not bothering for a shirt in the fog of sleep, and opened the door, only slightly surprised by Len at the door. 

 

“Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d take a look at your gun, see how efficient I could make it.” Mick stepped to the side, gesturing for him to come in and grabbed a beer for each of them. 

 

“You can go back to sleep,” He said, quiet like he always was this late at night. A rush of affection flooded Mick, unwanted and he fought to shove it down as it climbed his throat. 

 

“Wasn’t asleep in the first place,” Mick said, instead of whatever stupid thing he was going to say. He was lying, and they both knew it, but Len said nothing of it. Instead, he looked down at Mick’s gun and messed with it as Mick leaned back on his bed and picked up the book he had been reading. It was greek mythology, and he only read one chapter, over and over again.

 

“Read to me?” Len asked, quiet, as if he expected rejection.

 

“Hephaestus was the god of fire, masonry, and the forge,” Mick began. “He was thrown from Olympus by his mother, Hera, due to his appearance and his crippled foot.”

 

By the time he’d finished the story, Len was asleep at the table, Mick’s gun long forgotten. He placed a blanket over his sleeping friend, and fell asleep himself not long after. 

 

***

 

“When did you realize?” Sara asked, looking down at her hands as Mick bandaged them expertly. She had gotten carried away with training today.

 

“Realize what?” He asked gruffly, finishing wrapping her left and moving to her right.

 

“That you loved him.” Mick didn’t startle, not outwardly, but within he was a storm.

 

“I don’t think I’m capable, lady.” He said, laughing as if it were another joke, just another revelation that didn’t hold much weight. 

 

“You’d do anything for him. That has to count for something, right?” She asked, looking at him imploringly. Her eyes were wide, trusting, and he realized that she actually believed it. She thought he was like the rest of the team. She saw him as a person. Looking back on it, Mick realized it was her first mistake. 

 

“Just because you’ve done things, bad, terrible things, doesn’t mean you aren’t human. Doesn’t mean you can’t feel.” But she was wrong. The scars had thickened his skin, toughened him out until the only way to get through was to cut him open. “You love him.”

 

“That monster you see, the one out when we fight, that’s the real me. That’s what the fire shows me. It pulls you apart until you are forged new.” Sara seemed stubbornly attached to this idea.

 

“I have to believe that no matter how many people you kill, accidentally or not, you can still feel. You can love. I have to believe it,” Sara said, frowning down as he finished wrapping her hand, “because I have to know that I can too.” She said, standing. Before she could leave, Mick called out.

 

“Right after I got out of juvie. We met in some diner, one that his grandfather used to take him to. All the waiters knew him by name. He smiled at them, and they asked him about Lisa, about his dad, like they had no clue, like he hadn’t walked in there with cuts and bruises all the time. He introduced me as his best friend, and my god, I was so far gone.” Sara nodded, smiling slightly. 

 

“Are you ever gonna tell him?” She asked, and Mick laughed. He never answered her. 

 

***

 

The first phase of conditioning was running through all your memories, and corrupting them. 

 

This took Mick 47 years.

 

Every memory, instilled with fear, like a needle inserted to every fiber of your being. There’s no reason for it, it is just there. It leaves you not wanting to remember your past. Half a century, almost, of agonizing terror. You don’t even want them anymore.

 

Then comes erasure. Wiping anything that does not help your mission. 

 

Then, the kneading. Shaping into whoever they want.

 

The Time Masters were quite thorough. 

 

***

 

And yet, when he saw Snart, for the first time as Chronos, something flooded him. 

 

Flame.

 

He hadn’t wanted it in such a long time. Hadn’t needed to see it since conditioning. 

 

It filled him from the bottom up, and it made him angry. The Time Masters had warned against anger, told him that it distracts from the mission, but he felt it anyway. Gnawing at him, tearing him apart from the inside out, loud and hot and too much.

 

So when he fought Snart in the cell, he couldn’t bring himself to kill him. That hate, it was stronger than whatever the conditioning had done to him. 

 

***

 

“That,” Len drawled to the team as Jonah Hex walked away, “Is the look of a man left behind.”

 

Sara turned to face him.

 

“You think he was going to come with Rip, the first time he was here?” She asked. Mick’s mind was whirring as all the pieces he struggled to put together fit in place with Len’s words. That happened often.

 

“Rip,” Len said, when they’d returned to the ship. The captain turned, looking a bit exhausted already as he strapped himself into the captain’s chair. 

 

“Yes, Mr. Snart? We’re a bit busy right now, what with all the ‘keeping ourselves in existence thing’.” He said, like some kind of exasperated father.

 

“Hex is a good man. Don’t screw him up,” Len said, surprising both Mick and the captain with his honesty, delivered with the standard drawl and smirk, but both could tell that the icy sarcasm was gone. Rip, a bit too stunned for his standard retort, just nodded. 

 

***

 

He was still angry. He wasn’t sure when that would stop.

 

“The thing about hate, Mr. Rory,” Rip said to him when they were alone, “is that it can be worked past. And the line between hatred and love is far too easy to straddle.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you ever want to talk LoT (Or any dc/marvel shows), feel free to follow me on tumblr @bandaidbf or on twitter @suunflowerz!!


End file.
